Wieger Wamelink

Recognized under Tier 6 — Food Production & Space Agriculture, Wieger Wamelink conducts compelling and practically important research on growing food crops in Martian and lunar soil simulants. Wamelink's experiments at Wageningen University — demonstrating that a range of edible crops can be grown in simulants of Martian and lunar regolith, and investigating how soil amendment can address heavy metal and other challenges in those materials — have provided some of the most direct and publicly impactful evidence yet that Mars colonists could eventually grow food from local soil. This work bridges controlled-environment agriculture and the question of whether Martian soil itself could ever be made productive.